Last week, I attended my first International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It’s a big deal: 1.8 million square feet of noisy exhibition space inside a gigantic convention center, 3,200 exhibitors, all of them clamoring for attention, and 152,000 attendees, which explains, among other things, why there were about 1,000 people, no exaggeration, on the line waiting for taxis at the airport. All against the backdrop of Vegas.

I was there to moderate a panel about conflict minerals for Intel, about which, more below, but I have to say that I was underwhelmed by the rest of the show. Most of the gadgetry on display at the show struck me as expensive or useless, or both. No, I don’t want or need an 85-inch bendable TV. No, I don’t want or need wearable computers. (Nor does my dog need an integrated health and wellness platform.) The BMW i3 is a very cool new electric car but I am perfectlyu capable of making my own restaurant reservations, thanks, and I have Pandora on my phone, so I don’t need it built into the vehicle.

In fact, I have just about everything electronic or digital that I need on my phone, my iPad and laptop. As an industry expert named Brian Lam told Nick Bilton of The Times in this excellent summary of CES:

“You only need a phone and a tablet and a laptop, and maybe you need a TV and some headphones, but that covers 90 percent of the needs for 90 percent of the population,” said Mr. Lam, the editor of The Wirecutter, a gadget website. “But this industry that employs all of these engineers, and has all of these factories and sales people, needs you to throw out your old stuff and buy new stuff — even if that new stuff” is only slightly upgraded.

That said, I enjoyed learning about the issue of conflict minerals, and meeting Intel’s CEO, Brian Krzanich, who has led the company (and the electronics industry) effort to do something about the fact that the sales of tantulum, tungsten, tin and gold are helping to finance a two-decade old war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

I wrote about conflict minerals today for Guardian Sustainable Business. Here’s how my story begins:

Those efforts are being led by Intel, the giant (annual revenues of $52bn) maker of microprocessors for computer, tablets and mobile phones, among other things, and its new CEO, Brian Krzanich.

Near the end of a high-profile keynote address in which he demonstrated “smart earbuds”, 3D printing, advances in video gaming and an embedded processor designed to enable “wearable computing“, Krzanich paused and said:

“Okay. I’m going to switch gears for a minute now. … This is not an issue we would normally talk about at CES, but it is an issue that is very important and personal to me. That issue is conflict minerals.”

After he showed a somber video about the devastation in the Congo, where more than 5 million people have died since 1994 – many killed by armed groups using profits from the mining of four minerals, tantulum, tungsten, tin and gold – Krzanich promised that every Intel microprocessor will henceforth be conflict-free. The world’s first conflict-free processors will be validated as not containing minerals sourced from mines that finance fighting in the Congo, he said.

The story goes on to say that not all companies are on board with the effort to curb conflict minerals. In fact, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers have filed a lawsuit challenging a provision of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that requires companies to report on their use of conflict minerals.

So this unorthodox, corporate-backed antiwar effort has sparked its own backlash–from business groups. It’s remarkable how the chamber winds up on the wrong side of so many issues.

You can read the rest of my story here. If you are really interested in the topic, here’s the video of my panel with Krzanich, Sasha Lehznev of the Enough Project and the actor and activist Robin Wright, who, I was pleased to read, won a Golden Globe last night for her performance on House of Cards.